He was ashamed.
Since leaving this place, he’d crossed mountains and oceans, slain a white dragon, faced down ogres. But even healed of his wretched, wracking cough, he was still weak. The week of sailing to reach the Lost Island of Ee had not improved his health. Too many rough seas. Too much bad food.
The old monk waited at the top this time. An unseemly glee seemed to have taken possession of his lined, scarred face. Horn felt suddenly impatient with the old man. Irritated, even.
Or was that just his own fear at being given the power to choose his path?
“I have come,” he announced. Utterly unnecessary, but it was the sort of thing one said in such moments.
“You have succeeded, I trust,” the old monk said. “Or you would not have returned so soon.”
“Soon? I have been gone for several seasons.”
“Some quests take years. Or lifetimes.”
Lifetimes, plural? thought Horn. When he was young, he’d considered reincarnation unlikely, as well as probably too much trouble, given the karmic debt one was said to accrue. As he grew older, the idea of coming back for another try seemed less foolish, but sadly no more practical. “My quest took thirteen moons.”
It occurred to Horn that standing on ceremony would be pointless. The monk wanted greed, he could have greed. Horn merely wished to sleep in a bed that was neither rolling under him nor filled with biting insects swimming in his sweat. He unslung the padded leather bag in which the ceramic globe was nestled. “Here. It is yours. I took some pains to disguise the rod. It’s embedded in a crystal shell. That’s how I found it.”
With that, Horn pushed past the monk and into the Temple of Winds. He quickly located the monk’s cell he’d used for the three weeks when last he was there. Bare wooden walls, a ceiling with a faded painting of a thousand-eyed demon, and scant furniture. He’d seen better prisons, though this room had no lock on the door or guards in the hallway. The same threadbare linens lay rumpled on the straw mattress, under months’ worth of the everpresent dust.
He took a few moments to shake them out, then remade the bed, slipped into it, and slept the sleep of the blessed.
The next morning, Horn went to the refectory on his own. Usually there was rice soup for breakfast. Sometimes even a few eggs harvested from nests in the abandoned upper stories of the temple, or from the cliffs outside if one of the monks had been particularly in need of exercise.
Three of them were eating when he arrived, including the old man who had been his guide. In his time there before, Horn had never been offered any names. Nor had he heard the monks use names in their rare, brief conversations. They were just old men in an old temple.
Unsure whether or how to push the question of his compensation for retrieving the Rod of Winds, he settled for a skull bowl of congee and a somewhat withered peach. Horn ate in silence until his monk spoke up.
“You have walked the world, and brought us what we asked.”
Horn nodded. His mouth was full of the pasty rice stew. He quickly swallowed.
“It is time for your reward.” The monk reached within his robes to lay a small ivory box in front of Horn.
He studied the offering carefully. It was not much larger than the palm of his hand, and a finger’s width in thickness. The outside was covered with shallow carvings that reminded him of the art sailors made on walrus ivory or whalebones. The patterns were difficult to comprehend, something between thorny roses and things with far too many teeth.
Looking slightly to one side of the box, Horn called upon his years of training in the magical arts. Eyes that had peered through smoke and spell and scattering learned to see what was truly present, rather than what only seemed to be. It was still a box, still strangely carved, but it practically vibrated with the energies it contained-human energies formed under a working hand. This did not have the slick sheen of divine apparition.
“Powerful magic here,” he observed quietly. Some spellcaster had spent a good portion of his lifetime constructing this thing.
“You seek a powerful reward,” said the monk.
Horn picked up a chopstick and passed it close to the ivory box. Nothing. No spark, no smoke, no vibration or light.
Very gingerly, he touched bamboo to ivory. Again, quiescent. Where he might have expected a bit of flash and drama, he was encountering only, well, ivory.
The monks smiled as they watched. Clearly they would be no help to Horn. He was the great swordsman and master spellwright-it was up to him to sort this out.
Which was, in truth, fair enough.
Another careful stab with the chopstick provoked no additional reaction. Horn laid the utensil aside and reached for the ivory box. The monk had handled it without incident, after all.
Something clicked slightly as he lifted it. The weight and balance of the box shifted. It was only a container, not a thing in itself.
Looking over it in his hand, Horn saw how an inner box could be made to slide out the end of the carved shell. It was no different from the card boxes that soldiers and sailors sometimes carried in their kits.
Card boxes…
“You people,” he breathed. “This is the Deck of Many Things.”
“Fate in your hand.” The monk was positively grinning now. “Your choices are your own. Everything lies before you. Every path is in your hands.”
“Bastards,” Horn said.
The old men laughed at him before wandering off into the dusty shadows of their temple home. He heard the fading echoes of their mirth for a while.
Consequences
Horn racked his brain for whatever he might have read or heard about the Deck of Many Things. The monks had never shown him a library-they were obsessed with their map, and with listening to the wind-so even if he found one, he doubted it would contain much to aid him in understanding such an item.
Everyone knew the general gist, of course. The Deck of Many Things was a campfire favorite, for storytelling and idle boasting. Most people wouldn’t know what to do with a magic wand or a flaming sword or a crystal ball or many of the other legendary magic items and artifacts that supposedly littered the world.
But cards? Everybody understood cards. A metaphor for life, how the king ruled all but the knave snuck in beneath the queen, and the ace at the bottom could trump the very top. Colors and numbers and a swift flick of the hand could turn the fate of your last piece of silver, or make you a rich man indeed on a hot, lucky night.
He had to admit it: cold fear blew through him. All magic was balance. Who needed reincarnation to believe in karmic debt? Unwise or unlucky wizards learned fast enough how much one paid for one’s mistakes. One sometimes paid more dearly for one’s successes.
What he could recall of the Deck of Many Things strongly suggested a balancing act between bright blessings and arrant curses. What would he draw if he opened the ivory box? The keys to a kingdom? Or just as likely his own ruination.
The other piece of lore that came bubbling upward was the idea that he must commit to a number of draws from the Deck before he began. Horn wasn’t certain that was a rigorous rule, or simply a sensible rumor.
He’d never been a great risk taker. Study and practice had always been his way. That and careful planning. But what had he expected from these monks? Mystical guidance?
One could not plan for this. The Deck was worse than that time when he’d sought vengeance on behalf of the dying goddess Karrehein. It was wild power in his hand.
If Horn had been a praying man, he would have prayed. If he’d thought for a moment that the monks might give him practical advice, he’d have gone begging for their words.
But this was for him.
A day later, his chest still weak, he went to the top of the Path of Ten Thousand Steps and looked out across the ocean. Bottle-bright and the color of polished glass, it heaved and sparkled as only a great mass of water can do. No ships were visible, just water to the horizon. Great, swale-bellied clouds passed slowly overhead.